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Coming Up On 1-year Anniversary

Michael Jackson- Michael Jackson, Died June 25, 2009

A quarter of a century ago, back when it was only his suit that was white, Michael Jackson released Thriller. He was already famous, of course, and had been for most of his life, first as a member of the Jackson Five, then as a solo artist. But Thriller was something else again. As its birthday is celebrated with the release of an expanded edition of the original album, we will doubtless hear a lot about just how many copies it has sold.

With the former Frank Sinatra arranger/ conductor Quincy Jones behind the mixing desk, Jackson fashioned an album that ranged from a pop duet with Paul McCartney (The Girl Is Mine) to a rock crossover with Eddie Van Halen on guitar (Beat It), alongside soul ballads (Human Nature) and funky R&B (Billie Jean). He then invested heavily (financially and creatively) in the promo videos. If you were setting out a strategy for making the biggest-selling album of all time – and Jackson has since claimed he was – this is how you would do it.

But the sales units aren’t what’s really important here (unless you’re a fading star desperate for royalties on your back catalogue to prop up an extravagant lifestyle). What matters is that Thriller redrew the map of pop. The most effective fusion of white and black popular music since Elvis Presley, Thriller took elements of pop, rock, soul and R&B, and melded them together to create something new. Twenty-five years later, you can still hear the Thriller sound all over the charts, sometimes blatantly, as in the faithful recreations of Justin Timberlake, but, less overtly, in almost all of the chart-dominating music that looks for the middle course between pop and R&B: from Gwen Stefani’s whoops on The Sweet Escape to Rihanna’s rock guitars on Shut Up and Drive. The collaborators and remixers on the expanded Thriller’s new tracks – Akon, Kanye West, Will.i.am – surely aren’t there because hooking up with Jackson is a great career move; they’re there because they know the debt they owe him.

Perhaps you’re thinking that if you sell that many copies, then of course you’re going to influence everybody. But take a look at our two tables. The bestselling albums of all time include several that never influenced anybody; our list of the most influential albums contains a few that never troubled the charts. Patti Smith’s Horses, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ Gilded Palace of Sin, The Velvet Underground & Nico – these were not megasellers, but each has carved out a vital place for themselves over time, as generation after generation of artists looked back to them for inspiration.

Just a note on our methodology here. Discrepancies between different countries’ measurement systems make it hard to get a definitive list of the world’s bestselling albums that everyone will agree with (estimates of the global sales for Thriller, for example, vary from 40m to 100m). So, we’ve taken the American chart and extrapolated it, essentially by removing those acts whose nonUS sales aren’t in proportion to their Stateside success – so goodbye, Hootie and the Blow-fish. We’ve also ditched the greatest-hits sets. Our list of influential albums was compiled by a survey of Culture-section regulars.

There’s a scene in the first of the modern Batman movies where the Joker, played by Jack Nicholson, breaks into a museum. As the doors burst open, he says to his hench-men: “Gentlemen, let’s broaden our minds.” This serves as a good definition of what we mean by “influential” – this list contains the albums that revealed a new world to their listeners and opened up new territory for subsequent musicians. The Velvet Underground & Nico broadened minds in terms of its sound (the mix of distorted guitars, droning viola and minimalist drumming), its unusual lyrical subject matter (from sado-masochism to heroin addiction), its production quality (lo-fi scuzziness) and the band’s image (leather, shades, blank expressions). The influential albums are the ones that – on their original release – made people think “How did they do that?” (Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles), “I didn’t know you could do that” (Bob Dylan, the Ramones), “What’s going on here?” (Kraft-werk, Bowie, Public Enemy), or all three (Velvet Underground).

Pop music has always been about much more than just music; so, in our list, we’ve taken a broad view of what these albums are influencing. If we had limited ourselves exclusively to musical influence, for example, we might have removed Ziggy Stardust (musicians inspired by glam tend to favour Marc Bolan as a template) and replaced it with Bowie’s Low, which sowed the musical seeds for the next decade. But Ziggy was the album that changed our world. It told us that if you didn’t like the way you were, you could just reinvent yourself.

In a similar way, many of the albums on that list essentially announced the arrival of a new generation. “You don’t have to do it that way any more, you can do it like this” is the message implicit in Never Mind the Bollocks and Nevermind, in Revolver and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

A list of influential albums isn’t the same as a list of influential artists. Elvis – who kicked the doors open before anyone – isn’t here because his influence came through a series of singles. It’s also worth mentioning that, while we tended to favour older works (it takes a while for an album’s influence to be truly felt), a couple of brave, and perhaps prescient, souls put forward Radiohead’s In Rainbows, on the basis that it will dramatically influence the way music is distributed in the future.

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